Well look who’s back: the Fenty brigade, led by true believers of former D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty. Among them are my nemeses — whom I have referred to before as myopic twitsbecause of their inability to see that dog parks, bike paths and cupcake parlors do not make a “world-class city.”

So yet another pundit or politician has trivialized bike facilities (he probably means bike lanes) by lumping them in with the most frivolous-sounding improvements he could think of. Such tripe is usually reserved for Republicans. This is from a Heritage Foundation article:

At least Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) was kind enough not to mention bike paths in the same breath as squirrel parks when he attacks the TE program, but the implication is there, since bike and pedestrian improvements are a much bigger share of the program than parks for leash-less rodents or anything else:

Something is seriously wrong with government when we are forcing state governments to spend 10 percent [sic] of their transportation money on turtle tunnels, white squirrel parks, and movie theaters.”

The percentage of transportation money used for the TE program was actually much lower than 10%. And now it’s even lower.